Distorted Circle within a Polygon II is one in a series of works Mangold made in the early 1970s that create a tension between two basic geometric forms: the line painted on the picture plane and the shaped canvas that forms the work’s ground and structure. The conflict between these opposing shapes is tempered by use of flat, muted color, in this instance a grayish-green. Mangold’s work differed from other Minimalist practice of the 1960s and 1970s in his emphasis on subtle irregularities—note the distortion of this circle, within an irregular polygon. These differences imbue his work with a more “human” quality.

I’m never sure how I got into doing the circle paintings. One story I tell, … Sylvia [Plimack Mangold] and I spent a summer at Al Held’s farm in Boiceville, New York… . I was sitting there looking at curved hills and I started doing some funny kind of landscape works that had a slightly atmospheric rectangular top and then a curved bottom. I think it may have come from that summer where I was just looking at that space in nature, but when I got back to the city I started working with a compass curve, in a sense, and did a series of paintings that were parts of circles, a half-circle broken in different ways. –Robert Mangold